Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The iPad As a Shape-Recognition System

Posted by timothy on from the what-have-we-here dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an interesting use for the iPad: "The guys over at the Volumique blog have a different idea as to how to tackle apps for Apple's devices. They aren't just thinking about a digital activity on such devices, they are experimenting with using physical objects through Apple's multi-touch screens. Imagine being able to buy the playing pieces for a board game, but then loading up an app on your iPad for the actual board. The pieces would be recognized when placed on the iPad's screen, it would even recognize which direction they were facing. This may sound like an impossible feat unless you use a much more expensive device like Microsoft Surface, but Bertrand Duplat and Etienne Mineur at Volumique already have it working."

4 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Possible hoax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Since the iPad's screen will only respond to electrically conductive objects (such as your finger), and paper is used to interact with it in one of those pictures, I'm going to say there is a very high probability of this being a hoax.

  2. Love slashvertisements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    What is with Slashdot incessantly Slashvertising for the iPad? Why is it that any trivial thing done on an iPad becomes a news story here?

    What next? Steve Jobs lets a fart rip?

    1. Re:Love slashvertisements by mabhatter654 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      this isn't really trivial, iPad, unlike Surface is not using a camera, just the touch screen controller. It looks like they have a jail breaked iPad to get more fine grained access to the touch sensors. The neat technology is how they use flat "doped" paper stickers rather than something like a shaped rubber stamper, like other iPad/iPhone "pointers" on the market.

      This is also news because it will bring things like table top gaming into the digital age, without changing the nature of the games much. Doing this with a game like DnD miniatures would be neat. You could use a phone app to keep track of the squares and do all the damage calculations, etc. allowing for more complex play. When you get more than a few pieces in play the sheer accounting takes more time than playing... watch the Warhammer 40K crowd play and the game descends in to complex damage and stat accounting very quickly and not speedy play. A technology like this would revolutionize gaming. The paper "doping" didn't look like it changed the appearance of the physical cards either. There is one card game for PS3 that tries to use the camera for reading cards and a version of Pokemon tried having embedded codes on the printed cards, but it's just too much kludge. If you could play a game like Magic:TG just by showing your cards to the device you would open up all sorts of play, from having table top referees for one-on-one matches in person to playing somebody across the internet with the PHYSICAL cards, something that has proved difficult.

      So anyway, for the Slashdot crowd this is something most of us would actually use at some point.

  3. Re:Possible hoax by Tharsman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's not impossible, and like always, this slashdot title is the one lying. The hard pieces could have multiple spots (not just a shape) the screen would recognize as multi touches and then it's up to the app to recognize the pattern.

    You see, the article does not use the word "shape" anywhere, they just say "object recognition" and that's a world of difference.

    It is very likely they have come up with some sort of sticker with pre-defined touchspots and either pre-programmed these patterns on their app code or they made some settup screen to make the program learn the objects.